In this episode, Abi Noda explains how to measure developer experience and why a good developer experience matters. We also talk about: What factors influence developer experience What developer experience has to do with productivity, performance and even job retention The SPACE framework, and how to use it to measure productivity

Luca Galante runs a vibrant and fast-growing community around platform engineering and today he shares with us why every organization should invest in a platform engineering team. We also talk about: - what is platform engineering - the difference between platform engineering and DevOps - what developer productivity has to do with platform engineering - why self-service for developers is so important

Nadia Zhuk shares how to build a career as a self-taught programmer successfully. She learned to program all by herself and changed her career from being an English teacher to a full-stack developer. We also talk about: - teaching yourself programming - starting your developer career as a self-taught developer - getting your foot into tech - changing your career by teaching yourself how to program - moving countries and taking chances for a better life - how feature flags are used at...

Alexander Serebrenik gives us an overview of his exciting research on emotions and social aspects of software engineering. We also talk about: social aspects of software engineering, what software productivity has to do with your emotions and how you feel, problems such as confusion or frustration in code reviews, how to give respectful, yet candid code review feedback, and how ageism, sexism, and more lead to negative consequences such as drug abuse in software engineering.

Especially in recent years, several attacks on the software supply chain, like the SolarWinds attack or the ongoing Log4j vulnerability, made it clear that our complex software ecosystems are hard to understand and even harder to keep secure. The software bill of material aims at solving this problem. In this episode, Barak Brudo explains what a software bill of material is and why they are important for security and to reduce vulnerabilities. I also question if we are ever going to be able...

Heather Reid shares her difficult job search journey and how she overcame self-doubt and kept trying until she found the perfect job. Although Heather had been active in the testing community for over a decade, when she was searching for her newest role, she heard ‌she wasn’t a tester and that she had been gone too long gone. We also talk about: - bad interview experiences - why she was seen as "too long gone" in testing - how to handle job rejections - how she proved everyone that rejected...

Let's revisit the top 5 interviews in 2022, which gives us all the opportunity to listen to some episodes you might have already forgotten or missed. Episode Chapters: 0:00 Intro 01:21 Making money with open source 09:08 Profitable small bets 24:15 Career growth and mindset 35:12 Writing tests that find bugs 45:15 Drawbacks of being an engineering manager 55:50 Wrap-up and support the podcast 57:25 Closing song

Michael Lynch shares what he learned by writing code at Microsoft and Google, and how that differs from the software practices that he embraces in his own software company. We also talk about: - what is the root cause when code reviews are evil - how to establish a great code review practice - software engineering practices at Google and Microsoft, - how to balance code quality, time to market, and paying back technical debt - writing software as a bootstrapped business - his lessons learned...

Lauren Peate shares how engineering metrics can be ethical with Multitudes. We also talk about: - what are ethical developer metrics? - how to best measure developer productivity? - ensuring engineering metrics can not be misused - do developer metrics lead to gaming the system? - how can DORA metrics be used to improve team performance?

Micha Hernandez van Leuffen shares how and why he built Fiberplane, a platform for collaborative debugging notebooks. We also talk about: - the idea behind collaborative debugging notebooks, - how Fiberplane can help resolve incidents faster and blamelessly, - how Fiberplane works together with other debugging, monitoring, and observability tools, and - Micha's entrepreneurial journey building two startups in the developer productivity space.​

Ashley Hunsberger deeply cares for developers, their happiness, and their productivity. After seeing how vital developer experience is, Ashley set-out to work in a relatively new role with new responsibilities: developer experience. Now, she is the Director of developer experience at Tackle.io, and in this interview, she tells us all about what that actually means.

In this episode, I talk to Harshit Chitalia about how we can make security easier for developers. Harshit is the co-founder and CTO of Tromzo, a start-up dedicated to reducing the friction between developers and security. Before that Harshit spent eight years as Director of Engineering at Juniper Networks. We talk about: - why software security is sometimes difficult for developers - how static analysis tools can help developers with security - why Harshit founded Tromzo and - how this...

In this episode, I talk to Nicolas Dular, a senior full-stack engineer at GitLab, about his experience of becoming an engineering manager. We talk about: - how he became an engineering manager - what he liked about this role - what he did not like about being an engineering manager - and why he decided to move back to an individual contributor role.

From workplace dynamics to code reviews, misunderstandings can arise for a variety of reasons. People have different interpretations of things or of what is said, different assumptions of others' motives, and simply miss out on the information they need to understand something. This can lead to conflict building up over time. But what if there’s a way that people could come to a common understanding through common knowledge and similar wavelength? Jess Rose joins me in today’s episode to...

For engineers feeling stuck and unfulfilled, my guest Dagna Bieda has valuable advice. Dagna is a software engineer turned career coach who has mentored 50+ clients, some of whom worked at big brand names (such as LinkedIn, Amazon, Google, Disney), as well as much smaller businesses. Whether it’s for promotion, salary increase, landing a new job, or becoming a CTO, she’s committed to helping her clients reach their full potential. In this episode, Dagna talks about hitting a wall in her...

In the software world, there are a lot of opportunities. You just have to have the right mindset, preparations, and systems. In this episode, my guest Avdi Grimm shares how he found his independence by running a training and consulting business for over ten years. He reiterates the importance of time efficiency, task delegation, and why you should remove yourself as a bottleneck from your business. He also goes in-depth about the work he does on Graceful.Dev and how he is utilizing...

There is a simpler way to reduce complexity in our systems, and it starts with rethinking data. This is the core of Data-Oriented Programming and, in this episode, my guest Yehonathan Sharvit answers our questions about the paradigm. As an expert in the field, Yehonathan breaks down the basics of Data-Oriented Programming, how it compares to object-oriented programming and functional programming, and how we can apply it in our codebases.

In this episode, I talk to Emma Bostian, who recently started as a software engineer at Spotify. And Emma is the kind of person, that not only applies and interviews for jobs, but at the same time writes a complete book about her interviewing experience hunting for this dream job. This book sold so well, that she could pay back all her medical debt. Before joining Spotify, she worked for LogMeIn, and IBM. She won competitions and moved countries several times. We talk about: - her interview...

In this episode, my guest, Paige Bailey, shares her experience as a director of machine learning and machine learning operations. We discuss how we can ease the processes of reviewing data science codes through GitHub's codespaces and Copilot.

What does it take to foster a workplace culture where employees, specifically coders, have the liberty to learn without feeling punished for it by the system? Innovation is impossible without failure, but most work cultures suffocate creativity without realizing it. We talk about: - how she deviated away from a traditional path of a researcher to start her company, Catharsis Consulting, - how to foster a learning culture within your engineering team - what learning debt is and - how...

In this episode, I talk to Bekah Weigel, who runs the virtual coffee community about community building. Bekah graduated from a Bootcamp in 2019 and quickly created a striving and very special developer community in just under two years. We talk about: - how she kick-started the developer community virtual coffee - what it takes to run the community - how sponsorships make it possible to be sustainable, and - how community members take over a large part of running the community.

Daniel Vassallo left his cushy job at Amazon, where he made over half a million per year, to start his own business. We talk about: - anxiety when start-up attempts do not work out as planned - how he overcame failure - his strategy of small bets to reduce uncertainty - and all the little products that provide him with an average of 23K USD of profit per month.

Alvaro Trigo is a web developer who could quit his full-time job due to his popular open-source software FullPage.js. We talk about: - how to use open source to make a living - how long it took him to build software people want to buy - what he does against fraud - and his advice for developers that also want to go independent with open-source software.

Let’s look at some research studies together to see whether “happy developers are more productive”. I will let you know my take on it, and how it relates to the study I did on developer experience. We talk about: - whether happy developers are more productive - what makes developers happier at work - with which negative consequences do you have to reckon if developers are unhappy - and what are the most important factors that make developers more satisfied at work.